Create Change in your life

Affirmations can be very useful when you need to give yourself a pep talk occasionally, it doesn’t hurt to remind yourself from time to time what you can do or are capable of by way of some positive self talk. However don’t fall into the trap of contradicting yourself (saying something and then never carrying out the appropriate action). For example saying you feel great then immediately saying you feel terrible. Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Use statements that serve you in the present moment, for example to focus on a current goal or to increase your self-belief.

• Use words that mean something to you.

• Read your statements as often as you need to.

• Use your self talk when you are working on stopping negative thoughts, you can use them to replace any negative internal dialogue.

• Sometimes it may be necessary to first interrupt your current thought pattern, do this by changing state; either physically (going for a walk, exercise) or mentally (change what you are thinking about).

Examples:

• I am a very good singer

• Every day I am becoming more confident

• Today I feel great

admin Positive Thinking Beliefs, Positive Thinking, The mind

Your past is no indication of what lays ahead for you in the future, but it can get in the way if you let it. In fact the more you are prepared to let bygones be bygones and stop dwelling in the past the better your chances of success are in the future. Just because you have never done this or that, or that the last time you tried something you failed doesn’t mean it will happen in the future.

To create change in your life you need to look upon the future in a way that is different from how you view your past. It needs to be more optimistic and you need to get excited about it. You see most people probably can have the life they want, but all too many people can’t break out of the habit of living in the past.

If you think the past somehow will dictate your future you may well come unstuck, for instance an attitude of ‘I am the way I am, and that is how it will always be’ won’t help to move your life forward. Neither will ‘I’ve never been good at this before, what makes now so different’.

If you are planning on changing your life then all these attitudes need to be left behind. You have to be prepared to come at life with a new ‘anything is possible’ approach if you are to create a whole new life for yourself.

It can be done, the past may weigh heavy on your conscience now but it doesn’t have to, especially if you take action now to create new realities for yourself and your future.

Every day you are creating your new history; your future past is being created right now, this minute.

Start facing up to truths about who is responsible for your future. The past doesn’t have to have any part in your future and it is certainly no indication on how it will turn out, only the actions you take now can decide that.

admin Inspirational inspire

Everybody is prone to feeling down and low at times, but what actually causes us to feel unhappy? Is it external events which we are unable to control, is it events that haven’t happened but we imagine they’ve happened anyway or do we make ourselves feel bad regardless of external events.

Now there are external events such as accidents, disease, injury, loss of a loved one that we really do have no control over. If any such events happen then you just have to deal with them in your own personal way. But those specific circumstances aside, there are other such events that you can control, or more to the point you can control how you react or decide to feel about them.

• Lose your job? Perhaps you were destined for greater things.

• Failed to get the part in the movie? No problem it was a small role anyway.

When we feel low, how much of it is because of what we are saying to ourselves as opposed to circumstances which have befallen us? When we feel down, a lot of the time we are doing so in response to something occurring in our minds. We are saying to ourselves that our lives our bad, that we will never taste the sweet smell of success, that we will never ever be rich or that we will never ever come up with an idea for a business. All of a sudden we look all around and see nothing but negativity, the beggar in street seems to be everywhere, the person at the supermarket is surly and unfriendly, the house you live in isn’t big enough, your boss at work is always giving you a hard time.

We create an awful lot in our own heads that cause a great deal of our unhappiness. We are prone to continually run through again and again all the things that are missing in our lives, we become impatient with everybody around us, including ourselves. We call ourselves stupid, lazy and unmotivated. We have decided that changes will not happen and so there is very little point attempting to make anything happen.

Goals become utterly pointless, and are ignored, replaced instead by indolence. It is preferable to do less and less, You start to watch countless hours of TV, or watch movies, anything to distract you. The time spent on constructive activities that previously you would have found fulfilling becomes too much like hard work and so the activities are forgotten altogether, along with all the other plans that 2 or 3 months previous would have been adhered to and followed. And it’s a system, it becomes regular, like getting dressed in the morning or having breakfast and ‘oh yes’ remembering to forget all the things I should to today and to feel miserable instead.

It becomes normal behavior, it becomes easier to ignore the ‘goals’, the ‘to do lists’, life is easier this way. On top of all this you beat yourself up for feeling like you do, not only are you the reason for your mood you are also angry with yourself for feeling this way. Nice!

But is this all our own doing, isn’t someone else to blame or some recent event? Occasionally yes people feel down because of outside problems but a lot of the time people are the architect of their own blues. Life is ultimately a series of choices, I think most people are aware of this. But when people actually choose to feel lousy. What is going on there?

When you are in this cycle of doom, nothing ever seems to get done. One day you will wake up and realize months have passed you by and you have not moved forward one little bit.

So what is the solution to this? Well what works for one person may not work for another. Only you know how you make yourself feel the way you do. But if things are not right in your life, what is it that you want or need? At least get clear about what is required to make you feel good again and motivated. Take a look around, you are the reason you are where you are right now, and YOU will be the reason in 6 months time.

Don’t blame other people and especially don’t blame yourself. You have the power to change any aspect of your life, and it doesn’t have to take years. Understand this, if you don’t like your life right now, it doesn’t mean you won’t like your life in 6 or 12 months time, in fact when you are feeling down is it about you or is it about your life at that particular moment in time? You may dislike what you see around you today, but there is a different ‘You’, a different set of circumstances that you will like just waiting around the corner.

Nothing is ever set in stone, if you are not where you want to be it is not a permanent thing , it is just a blip on your journey to greater and better things. It is only ever temporary, life is only ever temporary. Because however bad you make yourself feel it doesn’t have to be forever, and it certainly doesn’t mean that it has to be like that in the future.

Believing this alone may help clear the fog that sets in front of your eyes from time to time.

admin Happiness Happiness

Continued from part 1

• Magnification or minimization: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your mistake or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other person’s imperfections). This is also called the ‘binocular trick’.

• Emotional reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: ‘I feel it, therefore it must be true.’

• ‘Should’ statements: You try to motivate yourself with ’should’s’ and ’shouldn’ts’, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. ‘Musts’ and ‘oughts’ are also offenders. The emotional consequences are guilt. When you direct ’should’ statements towards others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.

• Labeling and Mislabeling: This is an extreme form of over generalization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself. ‘I’m a loser’. When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label onto him. ‘He’s a stupid idiot.’ Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.

• Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event for which in fact you were not primarily responsible.

• Maladaptive thought: Any thoughts that are not useful to you in a given situation and do not help reach your goal.

admin Mind The mind

When you come up with negative beliefs as to why you can’t do something a lot of the time it is your mind distorting reality to such an extent that the belief seems totally real. The following are some cognitive distortions you may recognize:

• All or nothing thinking: You see things in black and white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.

• Over generalization: You see a single negative event as a never ending pattern.

• Mental filter: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively, so that your version of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors the entire beaker of water.

• Disqualifying the positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting they ‘don’t count’ for some reason or another. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.

• Jumping to conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.

1. Mind reading. You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don’t bother to check this out.
2. The fortune-teller error. You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already established fact.

See part 2 here.

admin Confidence, Mind The mind

Here is an exercise you might want to have a go with to help with any limiting beliefs you may have:
Write down what it is you want to do (goal, outcome, something you want to happen in the future):

• I want to do this ……..

Then write down why you can’t or the reasons (limiting beliefs that get in the way).

• But I can’t because ………

Then ask yourself the following questions and write down all your answers:

• What would happen if you could do it?

• What stops you?

• How would you know if what you are saying wasn’t true or how would you know if you were able to achieve your goal?

• How do you know that? (What are you seeing, hearing, feeling to indicate that it is not possible

• How does X cause Y (ie how does not having a degree mean that you are stupid?)

• How will you feel when the problem is no longer an issue?

An exercise like this is useful as it can help you see your outcome from a different perspective, ie it allows you to go into the future when the problem is no longer an issue. Give it a go and see what you get from it.

admin Random Beliefs, change your life

Why is it that all the negative, unproductive and sometimes hostile thoughts we have are always easier to believe than the positive, life enhancing and encouraging? You know the voices that say ‘this won’t work’ or ‘that will never happen’, the images of future events not turning out the way you would like them to, or possibly not happening at all. They all seem so believable and real!

The reality is of course much different, theoretically (at least) it is just as easy to believe that your future will be filled with everything you so desire. But it sometimes appears that we are a little bit more certain that our future won’t develop as we would like or contain the things we want to have.

This doesn’t happen for everybody but it probably happens to a lot of people. Reluctance to believe you will have what you want, that you can have what you want or that you even deserve what you want can be a real road block to achieving anything.

Now there could be many reasons why we ‘choose’ to believe what we believe, but it may be worth spending time to find out why YOU are choosing to believe the negative stuff.

Are any of the following applicable for you?

If I believe negative stuff it means I won’t be surprised when I fail I have a poor self image so it’s impossible to believe good things I have no choice in the matter, this is what I tell myself and that is all there is to it
If I look back on my life it is only bad things that have happened to me, so that is probably what will happen in the future. Believing I will be successful means I will have to work at making them happen and I’m lazy

Of course all of these might be true and then none of them may be true, it depends on your own circumstances, but whether you believe them or not, do they answer the question of why it seems easier to believe negative rather than positive things about yourself? Even if they did provide answers would you they satisfy you?

A lot of the time it depends on mood, generally if you are upbeat and feeling good you tend to gravitate towards a more optimistic and healthy view of the world, and in particular your role in it. Whereas when you are feeling low or depressed a cloud of doom can dampen your entire world and thus cause you to feel down and negative.

But does it really depend on mood or is there more to it?

I think that if you are feeling down then you have to address those reasons why you are feeling low which in turn should help with removing your negativity.

If you are continually believing that nothing good will ever happen to you, then it could be an indication of a more serious issue, (depression) and worthy of more attention.

One thing is certain, it is very hard to make any progress on goals, aspirations or anything else when you are wallowing in a sea of negativity. Nothing gets done, predominately because too much of your time is spent feeling down and thinking unhelpful, unconstructive thoughts.

When you get into a spiral of feeling low sometimes it is hard to break out of it. Time can sometimes be a great healer but unfortunately time is a commodity that we don’t have a lot of, especially when you are working towards goals you have already set yourself.

So when you wake up each morning, whilst eating breakfast and getting dressed, also spend some time thinking a few positive thoughts about your life and the day ahead. After all it takes just as much time and energy to think negative thoughts as it does positive ones.

admin Positive Thinking Positive Thinking

The month of December is by all accounts a time to celebrate good times with friends and family. It is also a time to look back on what you have achieved throughout the past year, a time of reflection on the things that you have done, or are currently doing and the things that you will continue to do in the future. It is a time to look back on what has been achieved rather than dwell on what hasn’t.

It is also a time when people most often look to the future, probably more than any other time in the year. When people make their plans for the future, the changing of the years seems to signify much more than the changing of the months or weeks.

But before the countdown starts to welcome in the New Year, it is important to have a clear vision, defined strategy or set of goals in place so when the New Year does arrive you are able to hit the ground running (or just carry on from where you left off previously).

Any time is a good time to create goals for yourself, but at the start of the year it just seems more logical, a brand new set of 12 months to play around with.

And so with that in mind, what are your plans for the coming year? What do you want to do? Where do you want to do it and when do you want to have it done by?

A vision for the year ahead is something that needs to be written down, spend some time with this, write it down on paper or type it up on the computer, don’t just think about it during your coffee break. When you write something down it somehow makes it seem more real, as opposed to just random thoughts in your mind. Play around with some different ideas and scenarios, which ones seem appealing, which ones don’t?

What is the time frame for each activity? Are you splitting the year up into quarters, every couple of months, half yearly, monthly or weekly?

• Are there any courses you want to start?

• How much money do you want to earn?

• Any places you want to travel to?

• Is there one thing you want more than anything else?

Once you have this list save it and refer to it often, use it to plan your monthly or weekly goals.

I think it is important to do this before January, the year has already started by then. Consequently when January does arrive you will already know what it is you have to do, you are aware of your mission (and have already accepted it). It is a tired old cliché but as you get older the years really do seem to pass by quicker, therefore taking time to complete tasks such as writing down your vision for the year ahead become ever more important.

admin Changing direction Changing direction, Goal Setting / Motivation

Henry Ford once said, ‘if you think you can or if you think you can’t, you’re right’, and he of course correct because whatever we say in our own life ultimately is the way things will be. Saying the words ‘I am’ has a powerful effect on your life and the way you live it. When looking at logical levels of change, your identity is at the top of the tree. Whoever you identify with will affect your beliefs, your capabilities, your behavior and finally your environment.

Levels of change:

1. Identity
2. Beliefs
3. Capabilities
4. Behavior
5. Environment

Depending on what you identify with, it can be good or bad.

Let’s say you want to start writing, until you start identifying yourself as ‘a writer’ as opposed to somebody who just writes, there will be in congruencies in your behavior, you will not really believe you are a writer. You may find you get stuck and are unable to move forward. You may even stop writing altogether, not quite believing you have what it takes to become a writer.

If you say you are ‘a writer’ then you will already believe it, you are already saying you have the capabilities to write, and your behavior will indicate this. While you don’t have to say you are a writer to write every day it won’t hurt, and there are many people who if they knew you were writing daily would call you a writer. You don’t necessarily need to have a book published to call yourself a writer. As long as you identify with being a writer your actions and beliefs will follow suit. If you say that you aren’t a writer than you may find you lack the self belief to take steps to get your work published.

While there is power in saying something positive ‘I am a writer, I am kind, I am successful in my job’ (the power comes from the way you actions and beliefs change as a result of what you say), the negatives can be just as powerful.

‘I am an idiot’, ‘I am a failure’, ‘I am lacking in confidence’, ‘I am lacking in ideas’, ‘I am lazy’. Can you think of any others you say to yourself?

1. Identity
2. Beliefs
3. Capabilities
4. Behavior
5. Environment

If you identity with ‘I am lazy’, what do you think will transpire in your life when you say that? Let’s say you want to start a business, great! You see the future, working for yourself, the money coming in, the feeling of satisfaction that you created your own destiny, you believe you can do it, and that you have the necessary capabilities, but wait, you have always seen yourself as somebody who is lazy, how are you going to make it all happen knowing you are lazy?

Of course you would like to run your own business but you’re lazy so it is equally important to sit around wasting hours not doing very much? After all isn’t that what being lazy is all about? Good luck with getting the business started lazy bones.

A slightly more useful identity would be of someone who is proactive in taking action. For example instead of ‘I am lazy’, say ‘I am pro-active in getting work done on a daily basis’.

See how your behavior and capabilities change when you say that?

You do realize you chose what to say to yourself, don’t you? If you aren’t getting or haven’t been getting the results you want for yourself maybe you need to change something? And perhaps you need to change what you say to yourself each day before you get out of bed? While you travel to work or while you are walking to the shops etc.

If you are happy with the way things are in your life, carry on doing what you are doing, if you’re not, then change what you do. Or at least understand that your life will not change until you do alter your behavior and for the purpose of this article in particular your identity.

Listen out for when you say ‘I am’, I am this or I am that. If it is not constructive, immediately change it.

Change ‘I am not confident’ into ‘I am confident of myself and my abilities to get things done and handle everything that comes my way’.

Instead of ‘I am a failure’, say ‘I am a success, I have achieved much in my life and I have what it takes to achieve a lot more’.

Unfortunately the mind will always dwell on the negative, it takes effort sometimes to be positive but the long term benefits will be there for all to see.

The images you make, the sounds you hear in your head have a direct impact on your productivity, and indeed your life, make sure you have all yours working for you rather than against you.

admin Positive Thinking Positive Thinking

Beliefs about your identity

We all have negative beliefs about ourselves and what we are capable of, yet how many of us have actually asked ourselves what exactly we are identifying with when we speak about our capabilities? How exactly have we managed to believe this and why? Has the belief you hold served you well up to now, will it serve you well in the future. Does it empower you in any way at all?

Here are some example negative beliefs and ways you can reframe them.

I won’t be able to get out of debt; I’ll probably be paying off my credit card forever.

Do you really want to be labeled as somebody who never managed to get out of debt and was al

admin Confidence, Positive Thinking Beliefs, Positive Thinking